TO survive one of the periodic famines that defined rural life before the advent of modern agriculture, the most desperate farmers might resort to eating the corn they had saved for next year’s planting. Without some saving grace, certain doom is the price of such temporary relief. The two great conservative parties of the English-speaking world find themselves in the self-same predicament: devoted sons of the Thatcher-Reagan consensus* that has dominated politics for more than thirty years, their only response to the manifest failure of such policies has been more of the same, demanded and implemented with an increasingly hysterical zeal. On the one shore of the Atlantic, “Brexit”, and on the other, Trump, constitute the final rejection of the old orthodoxy by each party’s own furious voters. Though different in many respects, both the British vote to leave the European Union and the election of Mr Trump as President of the United States have in each country effectively supplanted free-market conservatism with a tediously predictable strain of paranoid populist-nationalism. For Republicans and Tories alike, this is the scrawled cross at the foot of the suicide note they have spent the last twenty years writing.

The demographic breakdown of conservative support in the two countries is astonishing. While unimaginative free-market policies steadily eroded support among younger and less white voters, who found themselves paying more and more for housing and education on lower and less secure salaries, the abrupt, unscripted adoption of right-wing culture war by both conservative parties has widened the divide into a chasm. In the U.S., the majority of white voters supported Donald Trump, with his greatest lead among white voters over sixty-five. But in the rest of the electorate – younger and less white – his supporters are an embattled minority. More significantly, the personal unpopularity of Trump among young and minority of voters appears to have made his party unpopular with these same voters. The numbers in the U.K. are no less stark. Remorselessly pushing for “hard Brexit” has solidified Tory support amongst their white and elderly base at the cost of alienating everyone else. In the 2017 General Election, a hard-left Labour Party won more votes than the Tories among all voters surveyed younger than fifty , while the Tories had a 50-point lead with voters over seventy).

The backdrop of mounting inequality, declining wages, rising university fees, collapsing home ownership, soaring rents and deteriorating public services, particularly health, of which all apart from the latter disproportionately hurt the young, was politically tolerable only when unemployment was low and economic growth was high. The great recession and subsequent authoritarian-nationalist backlash by reliable conservative voters may have alienated a generation of younger voters from the right – particularly those from minority communities. And in indulging the worst excesses of their dwindling support base, the Republicans in 2016 and the Tories in 2017 each scraped a slender victory in their respective General Elections only by burning whatever goodwill they had left with the emerging majority. Collapsing home ownership, bottomless debt, endless austerity, stagnant wages and reactionary social attitudes will damn any conservative party in the eyes of the young. Both parties are so implicated in this disaster, and so deluded about the consequences of their policies (not to mention their own popularity), that only their massacre at the ballot box, again and again, will force them to see the truth.

Of course, politics never stops. The reversals suffered by the right will not be permanent, even if the price of resurgence is substantial ideological revision. Nor is its course straightforwardly predictable: the left is perfectly capable of squandering the opportunity presented by demographic breakdown, and arguably is already doing so by touting fantasy economics and vanishing down the rabbit hole of pointless identity grievances. Such signs are not encouraging. The right is long lost to madness; a sane left is our best hope.

 

Nathan

Tuesday April 24^th, 2018

London

 

*I do not use the term “neoliberalism” because it has, like “progressive”, long since lost all meaning. In so far as it is generally used, it is a snarl world thoughtlessly deployed by the far left against anyone tainted with the sin of economic realism.